Business cycle models often abstract from persistent household heterogeneity, despite its potentially significant implications for macroeconomic fluctuations and policy. We show empirically that the likelihood of being persistently financially constrained decreases with cognitive skills and...

This paper takes an otherwise standard real-business-cycle setup with government sector, and augments it with shocks to consumer confidence to study business cycle fluctuations. A surprise increase in consumer confidence generates higher utility, as the household values consumption more in...

Indicators of trust, confidence, optimism or sentiment among consumers and/or investors, are published continuously in the mass media. More importantly, these indices seem not only to reflect how the state of the real economy is perceived by private agents, but can also help predict the future...

A large body of literature explains the inferior position of unskilled workers by imposing a structural shift in the labor force skill composition. This paper takes a different approach by emphasizing the connection between cyclical variations in skilled and unskilled labor markets. Using a...

Sticky aggregate consumption is a demonstrable phenomenon in economies throughout the world, but to our knowledge it has not yet been incorporated into capital structure macroeconomics. Doing so suggests an explanation for business cycles. On the heels of a technological advance, sticky...

By means of a laboratory experiment, we show that, contrary to standard consumer theory, financially equivalent balance sheet profiles may be perceived as non fungible in a controlled frictionless environment with no probabilistic attributes. A large majority of subjects indeed have a bias in...

By means of a laboratory experiment, we show that, contrary to standard consumer theory, financially equivalent balance sheet profiles may be perceived as non fungible in a controlled frictionless environment with no probabilistic attributes. A large majority of subjects indeed have a bias in...

By means of a laboratory experiment, we show that, contrary to standard consumer theory, financially equivalent balance sheet profiles may be perceived as non fungible in a controlled frictionless environment with no probabilistic attributes. A large majority of subjects indeed have a bias in...

We study how household concerns about their future financial situation may affect the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a representative survey of UK households to compute the MPC from a hypothetical transfer of £500. Our main finding points to a key role...

Fungibility of money is a central assumption in the theory of consumer choice: any unit of money is substitutable for another. This implies that the composition of income or wealth is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many...